This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Present day data centers often make use of one or more remote access switches, sometimes termed “KVM” switches, for providing keyboard, video and mouse connectivity from a remote monitor to a selected one of a plurality of computers (typically workstations or servers) in a work environment such as an office or a data center. The Avocent Corp. of Huntsville, Ala. is a leader in providing state of the art data center connectivity and management products, and provides a number of different remote access switches that are suitable for various data center applications.
Presently available remote access appliances typically may provide a selected computer in a work environment or a data center with indirect access to “Extended Display Identification” (EDID) information relating to a monitor of a remote terminal, which is attempting to access the selected computer. The EDID information may be provided by the appliance to the selected computer. But in this configuration, the computer does not have direct access to the Data Display Channel (DDC) interface of the monitor. A real-time, bi-directional communications link with the DDC interface of the monitor is highly beneficial because it allows the selected computer to perform various calibration operations on the monitor (or on the data transmitted to the monitor) using real-time calibration information collected by one or more sensors of the monitor, and made available on the monitor's DDC interface. If this sensor data was made available to the selected computer via the DDC interface, the selected computer could use the data to calibrate the video data prior to sending the video data to the monitor.
In other instances a selected computer may have access to the DDC interface of the monitor (via the appliance), but can only obtain the EDID information from the monitor during its (the computer's) boot up process. In other words, there is no provision for supplying the EDID information to the selected computer from an external source or external location. As a result, this requires the selected computer to be rebooted (if it is already up and running) in order for it to obtain the EDID of a monitor that has selected it for use.